THE name Liverpool is bringing comfort to thousands of Kenyans living with HIV and Aids.

More than 100 clinics across the country, providing crucial advice and support for those who are HIV positive, bear the city's name.

Set up by the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine in 1998, they have helped ease the worry and suffering of thousands of people.

The Liverpool Voluntary Counselling and Testing and Care Centres, known as Liverpool VCTs, are just one of the ways the school is playing a leading role in the global endeavour to control the virus.

Dr David Lalloo, joint manager of the school's HIV knowledge programme, said dealing with HIV and Aids in Africa was a real emergency.

He said: "We all have a responsibility for responding to this emergency, it is not something we can leave Africa to deal with on its own."

The Liverpool VCT project began as a research study in Kenyan capital Nairobi and has led to the establishment of more than 100 centres across the country where counselling, testing and care are freely available.

The service is situated in health centres, shopping malls and military barracks.

Liverpool VCT recently became an independent nongovernment organisation, but continues to have close links with the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine.

Researchers at the school are also looking at the disease in Vietnam, Thailand, Sri Lanka, China and Russia.

They are closely involved in testing treatments for Aidsrelated illness, including tuberculosis and cryptococcal meningitis.

However, Dr Lalloo warned that the problem should not be ignored closer to home.

He said people were becoming too complacent about the risks of contracting HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases.

He said: "The problem of sexually transmitted diseases is getting worse in Liverpool.

"People in this country are becoming blase about HIV and Aids and are not taking the necessary precautions to safeguard themselves from sexually transmitted infection."

HIV research at the School of Tropical Medicine is carried out in partnership with Imperial College, London, and the University of Natal, Durban.

Around 400,000 Kenyans are expected to contract HIV in the next two years.

Age-old customs that Aids has turned into killers

On World Aids Day, visiting Kenyan journalist David Mugonyi writes for the Daily Post on how the disease has ravaged his country

JUST a few days after Kenya's vice president died at the Royal Free Hospital, Hampstead, his clan was toying with the idea of who among his brothers was best suited to take care of his wife and children.

That is how it is politely put, though in the real sense, the clan was suggesting that the vice president's wife be "inherited" - remarried to one of his younger brothers.

But as the clan elders were making the arrangement, nobody even knew what illness killed the vice president three months ago.

All that was known was that his personal physician, Dr Margaret Johnson, was an HIV/Aids expert.

But the vice president's wife refused to be drawn into any traditions and was declared an outcast by the clan.

Wife inheritance is a culture which has failed to die in the African country and has contributed immensely to the soaring rates of HIV/Aids infections, which kill about 700 people a day. This has left the government with 1.5m Aids orphans, and around 2.5m Kenyans were said to have the virus in 2000.

Many Kenyans don't use condoms. Another age-old custom which is facing the wrath of anti-Aids lobbyists is traditional circumcision, where an unsterilised knife is used to cut the skin.

Poverty which has led to the growth of many slums in Nairobi, Kenya's capital city, has also contributed to the spread of the pandemic.

Young girls have been driven out of school to work in brothels where sex without protection is normal.

Attempts by Kenya's new government to crackdown on those spreading the disease by encouraging them to go for voluntary tests and use condoms have not borne much success.

Women risk violence or divorce if they insist on condom use or refuse to have sex. Drug use has aggravated the Aids problem and a recent survey by an anti-drugs lobby established that the majority of school-age youths who were abusing drugs were promiscuous.

The Aids scourge now costs Kenya's economy about £15m annually in terms of lost man hours.

In addition, the country requires about £120m, which is more than the Ministry of Health annual budget, to provide anti-retroviral drugs to the millions of people infected by the virus.